In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be "replaced" by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten.- George Lucas 1988

I'm still neck deep in this, playing two different expansions with two different characters concurrently and really loving it:

I played the beta some years back and did not like it, but they've made some major changes and it is not a totally different game. It really is a fantastic game with far, FAR more content than I'll ever be able to see or do, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who liked Skyrim or Oblivion, with some caveats.

Caveats first:

It's an MMO, so you're playing it online. You can 100% totally play it solo the way you would a Skyrim and can completely disregard other players - I do - but to make it feel more like a solo game you want to go into the settings and adjust a bunch of stuff first.

I turn on the first person camera, turn off the glow around enemies and allies, turn off "name plates" that appear over the heads of players and enemies, turn off a few elements of the UI, and a few other odds and ends to strip things down. When that's done, it feels and plays very similar to a regular Elder Scrolls game.

Caveat 2:

You are free to wander far and wide, doing your own thing as you please and exploring and finding quests throughout the world, but Elder Scrolls Online is more a 'theme park' than a 'sandbox,' which is to say that you'll always find the same enemies in the same locations just waiting for you to arrive. It's not as random as a Skyrim or Oblivion, and doesn't feel as much like a living world.

It's also possible to do stories in the 'wrong' order, since they were initially designed for a linear trek through the world. This isn't a huge deal, and only in a few instances does it matter, but if you're all about story that's important to know.

WITH THAT ASIDE, HERE'S WHY IT'S AWESOME:

It's HUGE

Okay, first of all, this game is ENORMOUS. If you've played other Elder Scrolls games, some will be somewhat familiar: about 1/3 of Skyrim is included and explorable, the majority of the Oblivion map, and all of the Morrowind map.

And those things combined only make up about 1/20 of all the lands you can explore. You can wander for hours and hours and hours. Even better, all these different areas are VERY distinct from one another. They look different, feel different, have different stories and quests and things going on. It's just insane how big it is.

GOOD STORIES

The game has a main storyline you can follow. The world is split up into three factions, and each faction has its own lengthy storyline to follow, which is tied into the main story. Each faction has five primary zones, and each zone has its own story within that zone. (Each zone is roughly 1/3 to 1/2 the size of the Skyrim map.) And then within each zone are towns, ruins, castles, dungeons, etc, and each of THOSE locations has a short story to follow, usually related to the main zone story but not always.

PLUS, there are larger dungeons with their own self-contained stories. There are at least five guilds that each have their own unique storyline to follow. AND there are a series of single-player expansions that all have lengthy stories to follow in their own unique locations.

And by and large, a lot of these stories are really good. The lore is excellent. The characters and writing are often good. Not best of the best kind of stuff, but if you liked the stories in Oblivion and Skyrim, you'll like these.

MORE VARIED THAN I IMAGINED

It's an MMO, so I figured the game would most be clicking on enemies, getting loot, and repeating. Turns out there are far more options, if you're into them.

For example, right now I'm playing through the Dark Brotherhood story, which involves doing a lot of murder, stealth missions with full stealth game mechanics, backstabbing, etc. It's great. Previously, I worked for the Thieves Guild and spent a lot of time pickpocketing, breaking into homes and stealing stuff, evading guards, paying off bounties,, stealing wishlist stuff for rich NPCs, and so on.

People who are into crafting will be in heaven, because there are something like 10 or 12 different crafting trees you can develop with all that entails.

You can go to war and actually have large scale battles with other players, setting up siege equipment, taking over castles, assaulting towns, etc.

And a bunch more.

ALWAYS NEW STUFF COMING

Right now, they're on a schedule where they release one small solo expansion a year and one larger "chapter" expansion. With my second character, for example, I'm playing the Clockwork City, which came out late last year. Summerset just came out, which is HUGE. And later this year, Murkmire comes out, which is set in the swamp homeland of the lizard people. So there is always new stuff coming.

AND OTHER STUFF

But I am sick of typing this post and need to get back to work.

Anyway, Elder Scrolls Online is awesome. Way better than I expected, especially after I disliked the beta so much. It has improved a TON and is really tiding me over until the next Elder Scrolls game.

Open world racing game. Basically, imagine if in Outrun or Cruisin' USA you could make a left anywhere and go explore the country, or if they took Need For Speed and wedged it into a Grand Theft Auto map (except the map is much bigger).

And yeah, the map.

Holy shit.

Okay, so imagine you've got the entire map from GTA V with all of Los Angeles and the surrounding region, done at the same scale. Imagine you also have the entire map from GTA IV with all the boroughs of New York, also done at the same scale.

Imagine those two maps put together.

Now imagine that both of them are just small corners of an open map that encompasses the entire country, with cities like Chicago, Detroit, Miami, Washington DC, San Francisco, and others done at that same scale, too, plus vast regions like Yellowstone, Monument Valley, the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains, the southwest deserts, upstate New York, the Florida everglades, the bayous of the south, the Great Lakes, and more.

It's goddamn enormous.

When I first got the game, I decided to see if I could navigate from Miami to Seattle without ever looking at the map, and instead just relying on my knowledge of geography.

It took me two hours.

You can get across the whole country in about 40 minutes if you're speeding fast and you have a good route, so my time is longer than it has to be, but even that is crazy.

The level of details isn't as insanely fine as in GTA, but there is enough so that it's enjoyable just driving around looking for interesting locations and such.

There is plenty of structure, though, and you can skip the open world aspect entirely if you want to. There are loads and loads of formal races to do. Street racing, pro racing on tracks, off-road and rally racing, motorcross, and even speedboat races, airplane races, drifting competitions, and more.

As a pure racing game it's fine. If all you want is racing, stick with something like Forza. As an open world game, it's also fine. If you want true sandbox fun, stick with GTA or Just Cause.

I said the wrong thing to Kate and fuck, that hit me hard. I didn't think I'd end up living with the guilt of losing a videogame character, but here we are.

Sorry about your friend.

I've felt bad about video game characters before, as well as guilt for things I've done in games, but man, this one is just hitting a whole series of open wounds for me right now. The shit with Chloe. I just couldn't deal with it.

The writing is sometimes ... well, it just sounds like older people trying to write teens, and that's always pretty bad. Makes me cringe.

But the situations ring real and and true, and some of the stuff you're confronted with is really difficult.

I'll go back to it soon. I'm liking it too much. But that whole sequence from

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